What REALLY strikes me is NOT NGC 1350... yeah, I see the big whirlpool of 100's of billions stars- that is just overwhelming...

But look at the background and you see MANY other galaxies... many other hundreds of billions of stars per galaxy... maybe one of those photons that made that picture reflected off the eye of another wondering creature looking through a telescope... and that creature went home to tell others of its race that it saw numerous big whirlpools in the sky- maybe it posted a picture of the milky way on its version of the internet that took a FULL MINUTE to download!! Those that download that HUGE image might say "WOW! that is so cool!!" ... and maybe a few of them make a silly, sappy post like this one in response...

Thanks, Raoul... for reminding us how great, and how terribly small, we really are... A hair held at arms length would probably block out that area of the sky... imagine the billions of galaxies with hundreds of billions of stars- intelligent life may be astoundingly rare, but can any sane person doubt that somewhere some grad student is writing a paper using data from observations of our galaxy...

Hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars, each with planets... I dont care how rare intelligent life is, it MUST be out there...

Keep posting, Raoul